Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger: My work isn't finished yet

Mayor Miro Weinberger answered questions from reporters before unanimously winning the party's endorsement in his bid for his third term in office.
JESS ALOE/FREE PRESS

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Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger announces on Friday, September 1, 2017, that the city and New Moran, Inc. will cease redevelopment efforts at the Moran Plant on the city's waterfront.(Photo11: GLENN RUSSELL/FREE PRESS)Buy Photo

Mayor Miro Weinberger has a simple pitch to Burlington voters: Send him back to City Hall to finish what he started six years ago.

"What am I trying to get done as mayor? I'm trying to get things built," Weinberger said in an interview earlier this month from his temporary campaign space on College Street, "and I'm trying to make some cultural changes in the way that city government works."

Both of those goals take time, Weinberger said. He is running for his third three-year term.

"Building anything takes a long time and certainly organizational change takes time," he said, adding that organizations benefit from having stable leadership for at least a decade.

The things he's trying to build, he said, include public infrastructure and parks in addition to more housing and the downtown mall redevelopment. Burlington voters passed a 10-year infrastructure bond in 2016; Weinberger said one of the challenges that will face the next mayor is shepherding the city through the growth period.

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Mayor Miro Weinberger announces that he will not forward Keep BT Local as a potential buyer of Burlington Telecom during a news conference at his office on Tuesday, Oct. 10, 2017.(Photo11: RYAN MERCER/FREE PRESS)

Demolition is underway at the Burlington Town Center after the project cleared court challenges by a group of community activists and was narrowly approved by voters in 2016. The end result of the redevelopment is permitted for 272 residential units; office space; 95,000 square feet of "first class" retail space; a child care center; and community space. The project also would reconnect St. Paul and Cherry streets.

For many politically active Burlingtonians who were concerned about the size of the development, the mall is still a central issue when comparing Weinberger and the two hopefuls who want to replace him.

Weinberger is facing challengers from his left: Infinite Culcleasure, a community organizer who has charged the current administration with being out-of-touch with the needs of residents, especially the most vulnerable; and Carina Driscoll, who once worked on Weinberger's campaign but is now hoping to wrest away the City Hall office famously held by her stepfather, Bernie Sanders.

Driscoll has made the slogan "Burlington is not for sale," a central part of her campaign, pointing to the sale of Burlington Telecom to a privately-owned Indiana-based company over a local group of residents who formed a cooperative.

Driscoll said she supported Weinberger when he first ran because of Burlington's precarious financial situation six years ago. But, she said, especially now that Burlington's finances have stabilized, the city deserves leadership that will be receptive to public engagement, a statement echoed by Culcleasure.

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Some activists have said they felt the voices of residents have been ignored by Weinberger and his administration.

Karen Rowell, a New North End resident who led the charge against a reconfiguration of North Avenue last year, charged Weinberger and city official Chapin Spencer of skewing data from surveys of residents to silence critics.

Spencer said last summer that the city had made the survey report public within 24 hours of receiving it and did not "touch the data."

"We've worked very hard for two years to engage the public," he said. "Both the surveys had City Council review."

Weinberger has repeatedly expressed frustration about the charge that his administration is not transparent or receptive to public input, pointing to the evolution of the mall design and his weekly invitation to residents to drop by a New North End bagel shop to speak with him or a city official.

Driven by data

Weinberger also said his administration has pushed to make Burlington city government data-driven and push officials to make decisions based on "evidence, not intuition" -- and has released much of that data to the public.

A reliance on data is one of his changes to city government's culture, he said. Department heads meet monthly to hear statistics-driven presentations about the city's efforts.

At one meeting in October, city officials ranging from Fire Chief Steven Locke to Church Street Marketplace Director Ron Redmond puzzled over what to do about the rising percentage of rental code violations arising from disconnected smoke detectors, a trend spotlighted by Code Enforcement Director Bill Ward.

Gene Richards, who attended the meeting in his capacity as Burlington airport director, but is also a South Burlington landlord, pointed out that many tenants disconnect the smoke detectors because they may go off while a person is cooking.

That led officials, including Weinberger, to speculate whether the city could encourage the use of more technologically advanced detectors, which could avoid the issue.

Culture of City Hall

Cross-department collaboration is another cultural reform encouraged by Weinberger, who said he encourages employees to think of themselves as one government, instead of several departments.

"Every mayor brings a little different flavor," said Michael Schirling, who served as Burlington's police chief under Mayor Bob Kiss and Weinberger. "I think he brought an interesting balance of public engagement, data-driven decision making and using the knowledge of employees."

Schirling, who serves as the Secretary of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development under Gov. Phil Scott, said he was staying out of being involved in the mayoral race as a state official, but that he saw a shift towards using data for making decisions and a focus on fiscal responsibility when Weinberger took office.

"I think it helped to modernize some of the things that the city was doing," he said.

Contact Jess Aloe at 802-660-1874 or jaloe@freepressmedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @jess_aloe